In the Hour of No Light
by Lee Savage
Summary: Seem prays because she believes that's the best she can do. Non-TLF compliant. Mild Jak/Seem; canon pairings.


**In the Hour of No Light**

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Keira is beautiful, surely—encompassed with that radiant energy, chiming laugh, hands deft and always creating.

But there's less of a glimmer in those green eyes inside of Haven; she doesn't even wander near the slums, though Jak thinks that should be where most of her concern lies, being the good-hearted woman that Keira is.

But of course there is less of a glimmer.

It's getting better, Jak'll tell her, and she takes a moment to stare at him with this strange need.

Her greatest skill is her ability to keep her lover stable. She doesn't let him ponder, doesn't let him brood. And Jak is assured that this is his need. They are never alone anymore. Keira is no longer reliant on Erol's whims, his charisma, his broiling, mad eyes.

In the light, they smile and exchange banter, and Daxters cajols and nudges them as well, and sometimes he'll bring Tess along too in the healing Haven streets of a deep gray.

In the dark, they are sometimes curled together—whole.

Then, there is Spargus; Keira never visits, never lays near when Jak leaves her. It's his duty of course, to join the land of wastes and crumbling cliffs and slack-jawed raiders wielding guns against their burly, beastly frames. He needs to learn and be with his future subjects.

They are two halves separated, like the amulets of Damas and his son.

Oh, and there's the temple; yes, the ominous blues and oranges suddenly illuminated with the eyes of skittering crawlers and the artifacts' gazes. However, the crawlers and the artifacts, with their respective home marred of reverence and desecrated by furious wheels that scream like demons, are not Jak's reason to wander into the sacred place, the place of the precursor gods and unsung lore.

And Keira questions his need to conduct impromptu therapy sessions with a man that decorates himself in paint, and Daxter snickers and Jak simply replies that Seem is not a man.

Seem is a friend, though that word Jak considers too generous—when those red eyes glowed, melted in disbelief and fitting indignance at the flippancy he shows at the scars he inflicted upon her home.

Jak half-expects her, the monk, to render herself to spiteful threats, calling him a beast, a dark creature—like he remembers Keira staring with those same hurt eyes when she realizes Sandover Jak is hers alone in a dreamy figment because he no longer exists, and she'll have to make do.

But Seem says no such words.

Stories: this is the graciousness that draws the hero to the temple like a warm lover's embrace. These stories with a quiet rasp as Seem kneels amongst candles, an orange glow so keenly outshining the pale gold of the wasteland sun; the smell of smoke permeates the air and reminds them both of the day Errol arrived (and Seem wanted to accuse the hero of being just like Errol when he steered a large vehicle through the temple, but that would be so, so foolish, she thinks).

The coolness of the desert night mingles with an uneasiness of what is to come forward and a soft snore of winds.

And Keira is left, once more, with the coolness of the city night seeping into their bed and Daxter's snoring like an encroaching storm in the adjacent room.

Another absurd reason for his visits is that strange sensation of welcomeness derived from the simplest gesture of Seem's referring to Jak as "Mar." Mar, a hero's name. The name his parents gave him. Keira refuses to do so.

Your dad's dead, Keira will say with sympathetic eyes. That'll only make you think about—it all.

It whisks him further away from the young boy lying on a sand-swept shore. _Her_ Jak.

Jak, really, you shouldn't dwell. C'mon, can't we talk about something else, please?

Seem and Mar converse about the metalheads, the precursors; they reminisce and he kneels too in the entrance between his savage home and the sacred dwelling, and hears all about Damas with pleading eyes so unlike the hero who saved their world. The monk never whispers about herself, hardly meets Mar's steady gaze, so assured that her personal anecdotes are the least interesting topic that could derive from her tongue.

When he leaves, Seem asks the hero to be safe, be at peace with as much will as he can muster—_baroosh baroosh_—and tends to the pet leapers.

When he leaves, Seem questions her own knowledge, her sheltered studies in the temple, ever since she could hardly speak. She wonders what she truly knows, and the monk never outwardly asks Mar if he could teach her anything—though she believes her preserved bliss of monkhood, the assurance that she and her fellows are wise and gracious, is shattered.

(For she cannot forget the seething, the venomous, prejudiced tongues that lashed toward their hero's arrival; she cannot forget the tidings of doom they swept, the shuttered gazes, and their dealings with Count Veger.)

Soon, too soon, Sig dies in a bloody quarrel with several raiders, and their hero of bloodstained armor and shattered looks is now their king. They—the monks themselves—use knives to style his sun-marked mane into a wastelander's mane.

And he leaves to bathe in the pools surrounding his throne, and Seem swears—to her shame—that there is no boy, no naive bumbler, anymore. She sees only a man—only what is actually there.

Seem touches a clump of hair to her lips and rasps a benediction—a prayer to the precursors.

She then prays in the hour of no light, when all of the candles are hushed; the monk prays for the precursors to keep Mar safe.

Seem prays because she believes that's the best she can do.


End file.
